Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann in residence

‘Blue sort of something and benches’. Mixed media and wood, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Allen, Paris.

Hailing from Paris, Laëtitia undertakes her residency at Blitz through a collaborative, site-specific project titled ‘Anna’s Weekend’. The project will take the form of an extended workshop, working with a group of local participants, to develop furniture for the space; furniture which is both hybrid and multifunctional.

Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann was born in Paris, and is a graduate of Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Paris-Cergy. She currently lives and works in Paris and abroad. Laëtitia’s research is based on modern design, its representation and its failures. She sees her work as a kind of programme, where process is treated as inquiry – including the story of its own making – and approached as a critical laboratory. Every opportunity to present a new stage of research naturally brings new context and stories, which inform a site-specific proposal. References come from various fields – cinema, literature, history, architecture and design, all linked by their own narratives and potential for creating new layers of articulation.

Anna’s WeekendDesign is no longer a solution but a hypothesis. It’s not a definitive declaration, but a scene, a transitory moment, a container of possibilities, an unstable life-form that evolves over time.
Barbara Radice, Memphis, ed. Rizzoli 1984

It’s a collective appointment, a work zone, a workshop made available at the heart of an arts centre for a specified time. It’s a research tool, a practical approach towards and for the community, DIY between endangered institutions and philanthropic sponsors. It’s a question of luck and necessity, a pleasurable task, never a problem. It’s a fluctuating group, a variable geometry embodied, each time, in a unique manner. It’s an elementary principle: making items of furniture, furniture for daily use based on a wish list devised by the hosts/guests. It’s a moral contract and a production contract. It’s imagining design as a series of accidents. It’s an accident. A unique meeting between the members of a transient group. It’s the sharing of a practice, in a one-off and intensive fashion. It’s a group of reciprocal interests, a division of roles, of know-how of transmission and redistribution and superimposition of responsibilities. Of contradictory positions and ambiguous approaches. It’s horizontal. It’s work of distinction, of interchangeability, of multifunction and hybridisation. It’s an attempt. An open story. A test, a prototypical zone. It’s lemon zest. It’s a practice that defines its own method at each appearance, a work protocol that is a form in itself. Concrete experimentations. Suppositions. Sequences of form, of collaboration, of independence and community. It’s expending or conserving energy. It’s an analysis of the banal as a method and a working exercise. It’s a project of furniture, functional and hybrid, as a rampart against power and the banality of standardised, administrative furnishings. It’s a sorting zone for imagining solutions. For the comfort of the body and the heart. It’s inventing other approaches to design, planning other spaces, predicting other environments, imagining other lives. It’s offering travelling companions with whom one can discuss it. It’s choosing to evolve in a more generous context. It’s an open specification document. Aesthetic exercise and conceptual declaration. It’s generating furniture from the interior, adapting the final structure to the logical variables of the constraints of the location and its activities. It’s a contract that is defined during the process, prototypes of varying uses, benevolent collaborations. It’s a production choice: not of an original, of numbered pieces, but of prototypes, of experimentations of coordinated systems and independent expressions. It’s a non-professional and rigorous cooperative. It’s a different relationship with the world, more sophisticated, more elastic, more complex. It’s a story and its writing. It’s cinema without the image, but with volume, for the body. It’s a specific communication. It’s an invitation. AS WE.
Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann

Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann’s residency is also supported by the Embassy of France in Malta.